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Backblaze lets you add a personal encryption key. I guess they could log that key when you try to decrypt and restore, although I trust they don't. I suppose the NSA probably gets the key when it gets transmitted, but I don't really care. Am I missing something here? If Backblaze's encryption implementation is substantially worse, I may switch.



I suppose the NSA probably gets the key when it gets transmitted [...] Am I missing something here?

I'm not sure if you're being serious or sarcastic. ;)

Anyway, if you don't care who has access to your backups then obviously my argument has no relevance to you.


"Well, what do I have to hide?" is a bad argument with respect to whether the NSA should be doing the things it does, but with respect to whether I am going to spend money and effort to hide my photos and documents from them, I think it's a fair argument.

I care very much, however, whether hackers will have access to my files, as they can cause havoc with things like tax returns that the NSA won't (I mean, the government already has my tax returns....).

So I was mainly curious if there was some significant flaw in Backblaze's encryption that should worry me from the perspective of a non-nation state adversary.


Can anyone comment how Crashplan stacks up vs Backblaze here? I'm leaning towards it as it'll save the data for more than 30 days after deletion, and security's another factor in my choice.


It's much more flexible in terms of external drives, and deleted files.

You can also set multiple backup locations, by sharing space on your other computers.

They have a proprietary Java client, but it runs cross platform. It's completely painless to add your own encryption key to all backups.




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